Coming up on KBOO this Thursday at 11 am learn about a soon to be released book titled “Starship Century” Book your passage now on this exciting blast through space with fellow travelers like Steven Hawking, Freeman Dyson and local writer and educator, Richard ‘Rick’ Lovett.

“Starship Century” is edited by James Benford and Gregory Benford and they have collected some of the best minds in space exploration and the writing of science fiction.

Join me this Thursday from 11 am to 11:30 as we visit space and beyond…on KBOO Community Radio.

For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food--thinking about it, eating it--and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live. With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food. David Naimon hosts.

George Packer discusses his latest book, "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America," a broadbased look at how America has changed in the past thirty-five years. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky of the series Bookwaves.

Host Gene Bradley speaks with Craig Johnson, the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mystery series. Johnson’s series is the basis for Longmire, the hit A&E-TV original drama. They discuss Johnson's latest novel in the Longmire series, A SERPENT’S TOOTH. This time Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire finds himself in the crosshairs of a brewing religious war.

Matt Bell's novel is so unlike anything else you'll read this year that people are struggling to describe just what it is. The Washington Post says it's like a magical realist story chanted by druids on mushrooms, The Stranger says it feels like a Tolkein epic set inside Plato's cave and told by Carl Jung, others mention Calvino, Borges, Kafka, and the Bible. Earlier this year Flavorwire called Matt Bell one of the 10 best millennial writers you haven't read (yet) and NPR called Bell's book, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and theWoods, one of the smartest meditations on love, family and marriage in recent years. David Naimon hosts.

Host Jennifer Kemp interviews Washington State author Scott Elliott about his new novel TEMPLE GROVE, the story of a young man who is part Native American and who falls in love with Olympic National Park and makes a point to protect it, perhaps with disastrous consequences.

Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad. But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her--from Zadie Smith to Monica Ali to J.M. Coetzee--while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.

Host Sarika Mehta interviews Khaled Hosseini about his new book "And the Mountains Echoed," a multigenerational novel that follows its characters around the globe - from Kabul, to Paris, to San Francisco, to the Greek island of Tinos.

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and moved to the United States with his family in 1980, where he trained as a doctor with a specialty in internal medicine. He is the author of "The Kite Runner" and "A THousand Splendid Suns." He is also a Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Un Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which provides humanitartian assistance to the peopleof Afghanistan.

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Host Jim Schumock speaks with T.C. Boyle about his thirteenth novel, When the Killing's Done, which takes up some of the environmental themes of earlier novels such as A Friend of the Earth and The Tortilla Curtain, and stories like “Carnal Knowledge,”“Top of the Food Chain,”“Tooth and Claw.” It is set in the past decade on the California Channel Islands, where a rather testy turf war was fought between animal rights activists and the biologists of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy over the elimination of non-native species of plants and animals, and this provided the inspiration for the book. Boyle says that the novel "is a series of dramatic confrontations between those who say nay and those who say yea, but, as readers will I hope discover, such distinctions become increasingly more complex and ethically challenging. Just how precious is any given life — and who gets to decide?"

Host Dave Mazza speaks with Robert C. Donnelly, assistant professor of history at Gonzaga University, and author of "Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland."

In April 1956, Portland Oregonian investigative reporters Wallace Turner and William Lambert exposed organized crime rackets and rampant corruption within the city's law enforcement institutions. The biggest scandal involved Teamsters officials and the city's lucrative prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging operations. Turner and Lambert blew the cover on the Teamsters scheme to take over alcohol sales and distribution and profit from these fringe enterprises. The Rose City was seething with vice and intrigue.

The exposé and other reports of racketeering from around the country incited a national investigation into crime networks and union officials headed by the McClellan Committee, or officially, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. The Commission discovered evidence in Portland that helped prove Teamsters President Dave Beck's embezzlement of union funds and union Vice President Jimmy Hoffa's connection to the mob.

Dark Rose reveals the sordid details of an important period in the history of Portland.

Host Kathleen Stephenson speaks with Jason Felch, co-author with Ralph Frammolino, of "Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum." Felch talks about the illegal trade of looted antiquities and how some at the Getty Museum worked with networks of criminals to obtain illicit treasures.

Host Marianne Barisonek speaks with Portlander Martha Shelley, feminist, gay activist and author, about her The Throne in the Heart of the Sea and about her decades-long interest in Jezebel, a Phoenician princess who became the Queen of Israel.

Martha Shelley is a prolific writer on the intersection of women’s issues, politics and religion. She has spent the last few years researching the historical and religious role of women in the Bible to better understand today’s controversies created by the efforts for a more inclusive and powerful role for women in society and religious life.

Science fiction and fantasy writer China Mieville has won nearly every award in the genre and has caught the attention of mainstream publications from the New York Times to the Guardian with the depth of his imagination and the height of his erudition. David Naimon interviews him about his new, much anticipated, book "Embassytown," a book Ursula Le Guin describes as follows: "Embassytown is a fully achieved work of art…Works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigour and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being.”

Host Ed Goldberg speaks with Cara Black, author of "Murder in Passy," the latest in her popular series of detective novels set in Paris and featuring Aimee Leduc.

In her books Cara Black features a Paris little known outside the tourist track. In real life she lives in San Francisco where she is a San Francisco Library Laureate and a member of the Paris Societe Historique in the Marais. She is included in the "Great Women Mystery Writers," by Elizabeth Lindsay.

Host David Naimon interviews Portland writer Scott Sparling about his debut novel, Wire to Wire, from Tin House Books.

A pick of the week by Publisher's Weekly, they call Wire to Wire "well crafted and thrilling, tying together an obvious love for both Michigan and railroads with an expert sense of timing and plot. The world he has created is both overwhelming and exhilarating, thanks in no small part to a large ensemble of memorable characters and a relentless pace. Indeed, hardly a page goes by without some sort of fantastic calamity throwing Slater and company into further turmoil—when the most peaceful passages of the story are speed-addled, that's saying something—but it's done so well that hopping off this runaway train would never cross a reader's mind.”

Former Portlander Cary Groner talks about his novel Exiles, the story of an American volunteer doctor and his teenage daughter whose lives are irrevocably changed when they move to Kathmandu and find themselves in the midst of civil war.

Cary Groner studied Buddhist meditation and philosophy with the late Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, and continues to spend several weeks a year in meditation retreat when possible. In 2009, he received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Arizona. His short stories have won numerous awards. His story “Elaborate Preparations for Departure” won the Glimmer Train fiction open and was published in the summer 2010 issue. Hosted by Ren Green.

Comments

I've read the book twice and rather hoped to hear the program that the author spoke on the book. But that page was not available on your site. Anyway, I loved the book. I thought it was an exciting dose of history. Stoner brought the Portland of 1900 to life. There was intrigue that kept my interest throughout the book.